The present application relates to a method, a device, computer program product and a business method to conduct an inventory of electronic and/or IT resources such as servers, workstations, other hardware and cabling endpoints in a localized facility with a secure locator device and triangulation location methods.
The ability to accurately track, maintain, or locate information technology (IT) assets continues to plague the industry. IT assets such as hardware may be incorrectly entered into an asset database or may be moved without updating the asset database and cannot be physically found. These lost assets often result in lost revenue, missed contracted service level agreements, security issues, noncompliance with private and government regulations, and lost time spent in locating missing assets. The issue in locating assets is often that the asset database and reference diagrams were incorrectly loaded while performing the initial wall-to-wall inventory, performing inventory audits, or at the conclusion of an install, move, add, change (IMAC) activity. The asset database and the reference diagrams may not have been updated or relevant information about the asset was entered incorrectly or is missing.
The private sector as well as government accounts require a complete accounting of assets and may also require sensitive data associated with an asset supporting the account. Capturing this information is difficult if the asset(s) data were not correctly or fully captured, as stated above. The recovery steps to find missing or misidentified assets are generally handed off to onsite asset management personnel who are often specialized engineers to locate workstations and/or servers which are or have been mislabeled on the outside of the computer or incorrectly named or have other kinds of errors that occurred when recording the assets although the asset is often in plain sight. This approach to asset resolution is costly and very inefficient. It is not unheard of for such an effort to take days to find just one missing asset. Even though an asset management engineer may be able to logon remotely to an asset and obtain the asset information, this method still fails in capturing the physical location of the asset. Pinging the device fails to locate and provide the spatial XYZ coordinates respective to the location in the building or room in which the asset is physically located. The physical location and verification of these electronic hardware assets may be required for audit accounting purposes, government regulations, and install move add change requests. Most servers are in racks, inches away from each other, the presence and location of which may be missed even with the employment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Thus, using the above technologies and methodologies fail. Some facilities, moreover, are secure in that radio frequency (RF) and global positioning system (GPS) signals are blocked, as will be discussed.